From newbie to national award winner in one 'easy' step

 

I didn't have any experience in foreign reporting, I didn't know anything about Chile or South America or mining. I didn't speak Spanish.

 

National Newspaper Award winner Jennifer Yang.  

By Sarah Ratchford

It started out as just another September day in the Toronto Star newsroom for Jennifer Yang.
But then foreign editor Colin MacKenzie asked her to come see him.

Yang was told to pack her bags for Chile. She had never done any foreign reporting but had so impressed senior Star editors that she was being sent to report on the attempt to rescue 33 miners trapped 700 metres under a collapsed gold and copper mine in northern Chile. The Edmonton native had just completed a year in the Star's premier program for young journalists.

That meeting with MacKenzie also put the 27-year-old on the road to a National Newspaper Award.

But there were a few bumps on the road along the way and a bit of fear and trepidation.

"I didn't have any experience in foreign reporting, I didn't know anything about Chile or South America or mining. I didn't speak Spanish," she laughs.

"There were a lot of 'Why me?' feelings."

She quickly got over her fear, though, and spent a week brushing up on things she didn't know. She put her hard-won skills to work and did some mining of her own, combing through contacts to learn more about the scene she was about to face.

She may have done lots of homework but her arrival in Chile was completely overwhelming.

"It was just unlike anything I've ever experienced in reporting. There were hoards of media from around the world -- BBC, CNN, NBC -- media I'd never gone up against in competition for a story."

At the time of the rescue there were about 2,000 journalists clustered around the San Jose mine. Reporters descended on the families of the trapped miners, everyone trying to get the most poignant and emotional interviews, all of them driven to be the first and the best.

It was impossible to get through to the family of Florencio Avalos, the first miner to emerge after two months.

"I'd never seen anything that competitive. You really had to be strategic and creative, especially when you're going through a translator."

But Yang had befriended Avalos's sister prior to the rescue. The woman had always declined to talk to media and stayed out of the spotlight, but Yang found her on the day of her brother's rescue and she agreed to talk. The two woman stood side by side and watched as Avalos was brought to the surface.

Yang's NNA was for explanatory reporting, a category celebrating in-depth reporting on the complexities of a current event. Pieces submitted to this category are detail-centric, outlining terms, equipment, processes or theories.

The Star was nominated for 16 NNAs and took home three at the annual awards dinner in Ottawa May 13.

Photographer Lucas Oleniuk, a former intern in the Star one-year program, took home an award for news feature photography, his third NNA, and the Star also won a team award for its breaking news coverage of last summer's G20 protest.

The Star offers three different internships: the radio room, summer reporting, and a year-long reporting internship.

 

Sarah Ratchford is a Toronto Star intern who works in the radio room.

Meet five fearless woman who chase ambulances

They simultaneously conduct phone interviews, watch the news, scroll through tweets and try to decipher the heavily coded language that sometimes comes out of five scanners at once.

 

                                      Aleysha Haniff


                                      Galit Rodan
 
                                     Zoe McKnight

                                      Sarah Ratchford


                                     Amanda Kwan 


By Galit Rodan

Spot news.

As a student in Loyalist College’s photojournalism program eager to shoot – well, almost anything – the two four-letter words 'spot news' never failed to strike fear in my heart and elicit a chorus of grumbles and moans.

Had I fled law school only to become an ambulance chaser, that most reviled of all lawyers?

Spot news generally refers to hard-hitting news that is unplanned or unexpected. It is the death and destruction aspect of the news industry – from fires and killings to natural disasters.

Chasing spot news means talking to people who often don’t want to talk to you. It involves encounters with people who have just experienced some sort of loss, misfortune or heartbreak. And for an
industry newbie like me, it often involves feeling, at best, like a thorn in someone’s side and at worst, like a circling, swooping vulture.

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I’m a little sensitive and dislike being disliked. It actually makes me physically uncomfortable. I’m fairly certain that I turn red as a morning sunrise when somebody
yells at me. But I love photojournalism and so reluctantly completed my spot news assignments, mortified as I was.

Imagine, then, the irony of ending up a Toronto Star radio room intern. “The box,” as it is affectionately known, is all spot news and no photos. None of what I love and all of what I had previously approached with anxiety and consternation.

We “boxers” staff the radio room 24/7. There are five of us rotating this summer, all young and fresh-faced and female. We work alone, in eight-hour shifts, monitoring all the breaking news that’s fit to print and much that isn’t. We simultaneously conduct phone interviews, watch the news, scroll through tweets and try to decipher the heavily coded language that sometimes comes out of five scanners at once. We talk to editors, write stories, take dictation and field phone calls.
It’s a fitting job for us 20-somethings from the generation of A.D.D and multitasking.

For eight hours at a time, our whole lives are contained in one 10 x 15 foot room. We pack our meals and hasten our bathroom trips lest the city crumble to dust while we are not looking. Our greatest fear is
letting something slip by us and, in doing so, letting down the amazing team of editors and journalists we work with. We are quickly learning to adapt to those seemingly endless overnight shifts and do
whatever we have to do to stay alert. Resting our eyes is simply out of the question.

People say it is good to step out of your comfort zone. Sitting in the radio room at 5 a.m., with five scanners to my right, a phone and television to my left and an empty, sprawling newsroom before me, I
feel as though I have rocketed out of mine. My comfort zone, for the time being, is gone. I left it in Kingston, 260 kilometres east of here, when I moved two weeks ago.

But already, merely four shifts into my four-month contract, I can feel the fear and panic beginning to subside. More importantly, each shift has been a valuable learning experience and I am on my way to
becoming a better journalist. In time, perhaps a new comfort zone will be established.

In an hour, editors will begin trickling in. By the time I leave at 8 a.m., the newsroom will be steadily building to its busy, buzzing self, full of talented people who will help me grow and who I will look up to for as long as I am here.

And although standing outside in the sunlight after a whole night in the box makes me feel like I’m viewing the world while standing on my head, I realize that I am, in fact, gaining an entirely new perspective on the world.

Before I go, I would like to introduce my colleagues and myself. We are getting to know you intimately, Toronto, so it only seems fair.

I’m Galit Rodan and the other wonderful women I work with are Zoe McKnight, Sarah Ratchford, Aleysha Haniff and Amanda Kwan.

We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding as we experience your ups and downs with you.

 

Galit Rodan is a brand new Toronto Star reporting intern. Last month, she was named the Loyalist College photographer of the year.

 

No story is too big for Toronto Star reporting interns

 

                                                                                                            Photo by Lucas Oleniuk, TorontoStar
Toronto Star reporters Jesse McLean, Jennifer Yang and Jayme Poisson.

                    

By Aleysha Haniff

Jennifer Yang waited quietly in the shadows cast by bonfires and floodlights in the cool desert night.
She was riveted by the sight of men working to free Florencio Avalos, one of 33 miners trapped 700 metres underground in a devastating collapse of a gold and copper mine in northern Chile's Atacama Desert in August 2010.
By Yang's side was Violeta Avalos Silva. They waited as Silva's brother, Florencio Avalos, became the first miner hauled to safety.
The rescue at the San Jose mine had played out in the world spotlight for more than two months.
Camp Hope, the tent city that had sprung up during the rescue, was crammed with eager reporters and in the  twilight of the mid-October night they mobbed the Avalos family as the family waited for Florencio Avalos to be freed.
But not Yang.
The 27-year-old reporter, fresh from a year in the Toronto Star intern program, had bided her time and persuaded Silva to be interviewed away from the media storm.
Together in the shadows, the two women kept vigil, Silva holding her young daughter in her arms.
The mood was anxious, tense.
And then Silva turned to Yang, her eyes gleaming with tears as she saw her brother emerge from what could have been his grave.
“I don’t think I’ve ever experienced so much emotion while covering a story before,” Yang said.
Her story explaining how the rescue worked won a National Newspaper Award, May 13. The award is one of the most prestigious in Canadian journalism.
Foreign reporting is not that unusual for young reporters at the Toronto Star.
In February, one-year intern Jayme Poisson, 27, travelled to Cairo and chronicled a democratic uprising that would rock the Middle East.
Poisson remembers one emotionally charged scene in the crowd.
Wael Ghonim spent 12 days blindfolded in detention, unaware that Egyptians had died for the cause he had started on Facebook and Twitter. When he was released, supporters poured into Tahrir Square and Ghonim’s cousin grabbed Poisson by the arm, pulling her from the jumble of people onto a makeshift stage.
Poisson stood by Ghonim’s side as he addressed the roaring, jubilant crowd.
Cairo was Poisson's first foreign assignment and the stakes were high.
“It feels like incredible crushing pressure because it feels like you’re competing with the world.”
As Poisson returned from Egypt, 23-year-old Jesse McLean was off to Bahrain to cover that country's bloody revolt.
McLean walked among corpses peppered with shells at a hospital, looking through medical charts to learn the names of the dead.
At one point, Lucas Oleniuk, a Star photographer in Bahrain with McLean, had to dodge bullets powerful enough to pierce metal lampposts.
Oleniuk was a one-year photo department intern in 2003.
McLean, one of Yang's 'classmates' in the one-year intern program, was sent to Haiti to cover the earthquake that overwhelmed the island in January 2010. He was just four months into the one-year program at the time.
Yang and McLean are two of five reporters who completed the one-year internship in September 2010.
Both say the day-to-day grind of the program helped them get the job done when they covered history in the making.
Each September, the Toronto Star brings a fresh group of young journalists into the newsroom, where they spend time in a number of departments including city, business, living and photography. The program is open to journalists under 30 who have never held a  full-time, permanent staff position at a Canadian daily newspaper.
Yang said the Star’s emphasis on professional development drew her to the program. The interns would regularly have sessions on anything from filling out freedom of information requests to figuring out the  court system.
One of her favourites? Walking through the city with the Star’s Christopher Hume as he filled them in on the architecture and history of Toronto’s core.

Aleysha Haniff is a reporter in the Star's radio room. She recently finished her last year of journalism school at Ryerson University. Follow her on Twitter

From a single tweet . . .

By Sarah Millar

As they say, the times, they are a-changin'.

It used to be that as journalists, people would have to feed us information, make us privvy to something we didn't know. Sure, journalists still had to come up with story ideas and find stories on their own, but more often than not, journalists were given information — or pieces of information — and they had to follow up.

Nowadays, we live in an era of Facebook, Twitter and blogging where information is everywhere. It could be argued that nowadays we are inundated with information — there's so much of it coming at us at once. And, while social media can pose problems at times, it can also be a great place to find story ideas.

Sometimes as a journalist, you have to seek those ideas out by combing through the social web. But other times, the stories fall into your lap by happenstance.

For me, this could not have been more evident than this week when I broke a story because I follow John Stamos on Twitter. (Yes, I freely, and publicly, am admitting: I follow John Stamos on Twitter, but that's another blog post for another day.)

It was Monday and, as it always was, my Twitter feed was running in the background as I did my daily duties. I glanced at the pop ups when I could. But there was one tweet that caught my eye and I read it right away. It was a retweet from Stamos' account: some girl wanted tickets to his show this week in Niagara Falls. Stamos told her he'd give her two.

I read it a couple of times and at first came away with what a lucky girl this Natalie Léger was. But then my journalistic skills kicked in.

"I wonder who this girl is," I thought.

I clicked on her account, bringing up her profile. As it turns out, she goes to Ryerson.

Suddenly, this was no longer a decent deed done by a cool celebrity, this was a potential story.

I quickly informed my editor, who gave me the go ahead to write it. I contacted Léger via Facebook and Twitter, we set up an interview for that afternoon. Then I quickly tracked down Stamos' publicist to confirm what I was reading.

By 4 p.m., the story was posted on the website and the coolest thing happened: I got to watch as a story that I found — that I broke — made its way through the social web. And it was fascinating.

What really interests me about this story is how 10 years ago, Léger (or someone in the know) would have contacted the Star about her story. There's even a chance that no one would have contacted the press, and Léger would have gone to the concert as if it were just another show.

But instead, because of one single tweet, the Star contacted her (the first in a long line of media requests she got because of the Star's story).

So while many working journalists use Twitter and Facebook to find sources for stories they are already working on, sometimes stories can be found on social media in a way you never expected or anticipated.

And sometimes those stories come when you follow John Stamos on Twitter.

(Photo: John Stamos poses with Natalie Léger, who got to meet the Star after he saw a tweet of hers on Twitter earlier this week. Photo courtesy of Natalie Léger)

Sarah Millar is a web editor in the one-year intern program at the Star. You can usually find her tweeting up a storm.

Former Star interns win NNA nominations

By Alexandra MacAulay Abdelwahab

When nominations for the Canada's coveted National Newspaper Awards were announced Monday, March 21 two of the The Star's 16 nominations were for former reporting interns.
Jennifer Yang and Raveena Aulakh helped win the Star top spot with more nominations this year than any other paper in the country.

Yang, who finished the one-year internship program in September, was nominated in the explanatory work category for her article on the effort to save 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days.

Aulakh, a one-year intern in 2008, was recognized in the international reporting category for her stories on the emigration of young men from Punjab villages  to the West.

Here is what they had to say about the nomination:

Jennifer Yang:

What were you nominated for?
An explanatory feature I wrote on the rescue of the 33 trapped Chilean miners.

How does it feel?
It feels great and a little surreal. I'm still getting over the fact that I got to go to Chile in the first place!

Do you think your time in the Star intern program helped you get this nomination?

Definitely. I learned so many skills, and gained so much confidence, during my year interning at the Star. I'm not sure I could've pulled off this assignment without that year under my belt.

Raveena Aulakh:

What were you nominated for?

The nomination is for International Reporting for a series of stories dealing with immigration issues. The lead story was about life of women and seniors in Punjab villages, which are bereft of young men -- they have left to seek a better life in the West.
The exodus of thousands of young men from Punjab villages was a story that had never been told. We have always written stories about the impact of immigration on Canada; what happens when immigrants arrive in a new country and how they cope. What no one had written about was what do they leave behind: empty villages, insecure women and seniors and dozens of social problems. I knew and understood the story because I was born and raised in India and I had seen it play out many times in villages in Punjab. I could ask probe and ask questions that others could not.

How does it feel?
It feels really good because a) it is my first such nomination in Canada, and b) it's a validation of the faith many, many editors have in me.

Do you think your time in the Star intern program helped you get this nomination?

The Star's intern program is the best possible training ground where interns are trusted with the biggest and best stories. Anyone who can pull off that one very, very busy year can do anything. Seriously.

 

Alexandra MacAulay Abdelwahab is an intern in the radio room. She is finishing up her fourth year of journalism at Ryerson. You can follow her on Twitter

You can't misspell DUMBBELL and come out feeling good

(Please note: Instead of correcting the mistakes detected in this blog post, I'm bolding everything that the wordpress proofreader underlines. Believe me, it'll take all of my willpower to avoid correcting the errors, but I need to know if this exercise will result in rehabilitation or public shaming.)

 

"Of course I can spell -- I'm a goddamn journalist."

Those sound like famous last words, don't they?

Well, either way, it's what I said to myself before the phone-administered spelling test I took today (the second part of an interview process for a summer reporting job at the Star). In hindsight, the comment was a perfect example of delusionary self-aggrandizing.

Alright, I'm being somewhat melodramatic. I did okay (got about 70%) - but that's not the crappy part. What sucks is that (a) I thought I'd do really well and (b) I misspelled relatively simple words like "dumbbell" and "ingenious." (I know. I know.) 

To be honest, I didn't even think to peruse the dictionary, nor did I google "commonly misspelled words." I figured the lexical litmus test would be both accurate and favourable. (<---But proofreader, I'm Canadian! We're in favour of the 'u'! )

Now, I kind of feel like a chef's apprentice who burned the souffle (<---phew! I was unsure about that one as I typed!)

The point: I guess I never really stopped to think about how much of my grammatical prowess is computer-generated.

  Those squiggly red lines and check-marked buttons are trusted allies that I'm sure many of us take for granted.  I frequently google things that I'm certain I'm messing up, but I don't worry because a friendly "Did you mean ...?" will link me to my properly-spelled destination.

Not too long ago, I started to hand-write a letter and then decided to type it up and print it out instead. Why? Because it's easier to click "accept change" than it is to track down that ancient substance called white-out. Also "does that look right?" is probably not something you should be asking yourself every three sentences.

(As you've probably noticed, this exercise isn't getting me anywhere. It is, after all, a self-administered test ... and I'm [sub]consciously shying away from things I can't spell.)

Dang it.

Well, I guess I can find solace in the fact that proofreaders aren't always helpful (See the blog: DAMN YOU, AUTO CORRECT!) and that I will be filing my stories on a trusty computer.

Still, if I ever get stranded on a remote island and I put my memoirs in a bottle for posterity, please have someone look them over -- lest I be remembered as a sub-par speller.

In closing, if these kids can recover from their mishaps, so can I!

 

 

 

Fabiola Carletti is a former Toronto Star radio room reporter and graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism. Her digital footprints are all over the internet, but you can learn more about her by reading her blog, or chasing her around on twitter. 

Photo Credit: Contemplating the dumbbells. Photo by Jen and Tony Bot on Flickr

A netherworld of dead people, mug shots of killers and old press releases

By Carys Mills
It’s 4 a.m. in the Toronto Star’s Radio Room and the scanners are quiet.
I was reading scattered, multicoloured Post-Its plastered in the office at this point of my last overnight shift.
They displayed quotes radio roomers had heard over the scanners years before.
But the Star’s in the midst of a major makeover and just over a week ago the Radio Room moved to a new office. In preparation for the moving day, the Post-Its were taken down along with the Box’s other layers of history.
It took the 13 students who staff the 24/7 operation weeks to pack up our office into blue plastic storage bins.
We only moved 30 steps across the newsroom but moving an institution is no easy task.
This year’s radio roomers, like the hundreds before us, listen to police scanners, monitor emergency websites, staff the phones and do everything possible to get breaking news online and in the paper.
The Box was once staffed by City reporters but an internship program was eventually created, reporters told me. Now, university and college students work a couple of eight hour shifts a week.
Not much had changed since the Ryerson Review of Journalism wrote about the Radio Room 13 years ago.
“A 15-by-10-foot room in The Toronto Star newsroom, the box is a netherworld filled with photos of dead people, mug shots of killers and old press releases about Paul Bernardo,” wrote Alex Gillis, who sat in on at least one shift with a student for his story.
Add a few maps of policing districts and his description is similar to the Radio Room I knew.
“A counter circles the room stacked with electronics: seven radio scanners, two computers, two telephones, a television, a fax machine and a portable radio,” he wrote.
“Under the counter are black cabinets filled with files of past murders, sexual assaults, robberies, fatalities and thefts.”
The move was planned for 10 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 26. That meant the Radio Room had to disconnect from the world, at least briefly. The radio roomer working then, Liem Vu, was stationed at another desk while the scanners, computers and TV were unhooked and storage bins moved.
Before moving, Liem did some last minute cleaning and found a dusty cigar behind our mailboxes. We can only guess how long it had been there and who it belonged to.
The night before the move, I was cleaning I found papers older than I am, packed up dusty books and took down those Post-Its (I remember one mentioned a suspect with the last name Innocent).Later that night, two staffers stood in the Box, saying goodbye to what they called an institution.
It will take a while but I’m sure this new Box will have the same status one day.
 
Moving day photos by Liem Vu
New radio room photos by Carys Mills
 
 

How my kid brother learned to love journalism

By Gloria Er-Chua

My 14-year-old brother Emmanuel has wanted to be a police officer since he was six. But a visit to the Star may have thrown that plan into disarray. 

Weeks ago, my parents had coaxed Emmanuel into following me to work on Take Your Kids To Work Day. On Nov. 3, my unwillingly little brother followed me to the office, where he had an hour to kill with me in the radio room since his program didn’t start until 9 a.m. and my shift began at 8 a.m.

He half-listened as I gave him a tour of the Box. Thankfully, just as I had run out of things to say at about 8:05 a.m., all hell -- or water mains, I should say -- broke loose.

This was the morning a flood at the TTC’s Greenwood station had created a commuting nightmare on the Bloor-Danforth line. The overnight radio roomer had filed a short web story but the assignment editors wanted more details.

I called 55 Division police for crowd numbers. A few minutes later, I had TTC spokesman Kevin Carrington on the line. As I frantically typed out a story while speaking to him, I heard officers give a description of the commuters waiting for shuttle buses over one of the police scanners.

“Manny,” I said distractedly, “follow this.”

To my surprise, the next time I looked up from the computer screen, he had pulled his chair next to the scanner and was listening intently. As I typed, he read over my shoulder.

“What about the alternate bus routes?” he suddenly asked.

Huh?

An e-mail had just arrived in my inbox from the TTC with two other ways to get downtown, he told me. I hadn’t noticed it, but I quickly threw in a line about the suggested routes and sent the story off to the web editors. A few minutes later, we checked thestar.com and the story was on the homepage.

“Whoa,” he said. “That was fast.”

My brother had always thought of reporters as the boring people who broke exciting news but, at that moment, I saw a flicker of admiration in his eyes. The action doesn’t only exist on the police side of things, I reminded him.

I asked if he would ever consider reporting or working in a radio room.

“This is pretty cool,” he answered. In teenage boy-speak, that means yes.

 

Gloria Er-Chua works in the Star radio room. She has previously interned at the Kingston Whig-Standard and a magazine in Quebec. You can follow her on Twitter

The secret life of a 21st century journalist

By Sarah Millar

A blog post by former Star radio roomer Alex Posadzki got me thinking about what it means to be a journalist in the digital age.

In her post, Posadzki muses about her so-called "double life" — her professional one and her personal. She's so concerned about the two that she has two separate Facebook accounts, two email addresses, two different circles of friends.

And never the twain shall meet.

It got me thinking about how different being a journalist is today than it was even just 10 years ago.

While the Internet has made our jobs infinitely easier (for better or for worse), it also has made our lives a lot harder.

After all, journalists tend to be held to a higher accord than other people — they're supposed to appear unbiased, report the facts, keep their opinions in check. Sure, that was easy before the Internet — and social media — reared its ugly head, but now journalists are in trouble.

They're being disciplined or fired for things they say on Twitter. They're trying to decide murky, ethical issues (like should a source be friended on Facebook?). And on top of all of this, they're trying to create a personal brand in order to better market themselves in these tough economic times.

So what's a 21st century journalist to do?

There are no concrete answers. News organizations and employers have yet to figure all this stuff out for themselves — social media policies are almost non-existent or incredibly vague.

Is Posadzki right? Do we need two accounts everywhere in order to keep the personal, personal and the professional, professional? I'd wager no.

All these social media platforms come with privacy settings — Facebook can be customized any way a user wants. My advice is to get to know them and use them however you see fit. Personally, I keep my Facebook private, but my Twitter is open to all.

Is being a journalist harder in the digital age? It may just be, but that doesn't mean you should ever feel you have to hide who you really are for fear of being found out. It's who we really are deep down inside that makes us great journalists.

Sarah Millar is a web editor in the one-year intern program at the Star. While she won't friend you on Facebook, her Twitter account is open to the public.

Star's Allison Cross talks about Emmy win

By Sarah Millar

60 Minutes. Nightline. 48 Hours Mystery.

Those were the programs that Canadian students, including the Toronto Star's own Allison Cross, were up against for the outstanding investigative journalism in a news magazine Emmy.

Yes, an Emmy.

Imagine their surprise when they won.

"It was shocking," Cross says nearly a week after her win. "I'm still in shock. I'm not sure it will ever sink in."

The film was a 20-minute documentary about the global trade of electronic waste. It was done by Cross, along with nine other students and three instructors at the University of British Columbia's school of journalism as part of the school's international journalism course.

The documentary explored how electronic waste (such as old computers, cell phones, televisions etc.) is often disposed of illegally in developing countries, despite Canadian charities and recyclers offering to dispose of the materials safely. Workers in the developing nations often dismantle the electronics by smashing or burning them to access the metals inside and, in the process, poison themselves and the environment. The documentary aired on PBS' Frontline/Word in June 2009.

Cross says the idea came from a professor, Peter Klein. He had seen media coverage of a Chinese village dubbed the "e-waste capital of the world." Instead of the students redoing that story, they expanded on it — visiting other countries where e-waste is dumped, like Ghana and India, as well as China and Hong Kong. Being in a port city where much of the e-waste leaves the country, the students started their documentary in Vancouver, and then followed the products around the world.

While working on their documentary, they also discovered another problem with how e-waste is destroyed — the breach of data security.

"While in Ghana, members of the team purchased used hard drives from an electronics market. On the hard drives we found personal banking information, photographs and security contracts between the American military contractor Northrop Grumman and the U.S. government," Cross explains.

While the documentary may not have changed how e-waste is disposed of, Cross says working on the documentary definitely helped her as a journalist. She says it has given her the confidence to see what she is capable of achieving. It also piqued her interest in international journalism.

"After we finished the project, I went on to spend six months in Sierra Leone working in media development, a month on board a Canadian navy warship on the hunt for pirates off the coast of Yemen."

Winning — or even being nominated — for an Emmy never crossed the students' minds. Klein encouraged them to submit their work for numerous awards, which in and of itself was a lot of work. But, Cross says, she's now glad they did.

The award for outstanding investigative journalism in a news magazine was the first award to be announced, so the group spent the remaining two hours passing around the Emmy and taking photos with it. Then they got to make their phone calls. She texted her parents and brother first, then announced the win on Twitter.

As for what comes next or how to top an Emmy win, Cross isn't sure. 

"I think that’s why Emmys are supposed to come at the end of your career, and not at the beginning."

 

Sarah Millar is a web editor in the Star's one-year intern program. She has worked both in print and online at papers big, the National Post, medium, the Hamilton Spectator and small, the Kincardine News, a community weekly.